Artist Francisco Dominguez looks over the artwork of Sandow Birks', " GI Homecoming", from the new exhibit "Hobos to Street People," at the California Historical Society, Thursday Feb. 19, 2009, in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle

Artist Francisco Dominguez looks over the artwork of Sandow Birks',...

Anyone who thinks homelessness, economic disparity and national financial crisis have only hammered our current times and the Great Depression will be startled by the exhibit that has opened at the California Historical Society in San Francisco.

Titled "Hobos to Homelessness: Artists' Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present," the show demonstrates through photos, paintings and drawings how the same images of despair are echoed in every decade dating back - at least - to the 1930s.

Take, for example, the 1995 New Yorker cover adapted from a painting by Eric Drooker. It shows two bedraggled street characters huddled in the snow around a fire in a trash can. The gloomy, dark-hued scene could have been pulled from the 1930s. Or '40s. Or today.

And then there is the 1950 wood engraving by Fritz Eichenberg titled "Christ of the Breadline." It shows a line of bedraggled people waiting in line for handout food, with a silhouette of Jesus in the middle of the line. The point of the piece is that just like many of the poor of the 1950s, Christ was also penniless, homeless and hungry - a comparison made not just in this century or the last, but in every century dating back 2,000 years.

The message: Starvation and economic desperation look the same, even as the terminology changes.

Two generations ago, street people were called hobos or bums - but the struggle in the eyes of the photos from the 1930s might just as well be in the images of those we call street people today.

Organizers of the exhibit of 45 artists, which opened Thursday, say they hope that by seeing the similarities of different periods of pennilessness, visitors will be inspired to rouse the same compassion and energy that helped diminish poverty in the Great Depression and other times.

"Artists have always been into thinking that what they can do can change life," said David Crosson, head of the California Historical Society. "If we can't also engage in a way that helps change your lives, then we have failed. We're here to make the world a better place."

Organizers included a few images by the famous Great Depression photographer, Dorothea Lange, but in the interests of bringing a new impression to the sweep of photography, they stayed away from her most recognized image of all, the picture of the Dust Bowl mother cradling a child. Instead, we find side-by-side 1930s photos of two vagrants sleeping in the middle of San Francisco's Howard Street - then the heart of Skid Row - and a family of Mexican migrants alongside their broken-down car in the Central Valley.

Comparing those photos to, say, those shot of chronically homeless people on San Francisco sidewalks in 2006 by Hayward photographer Robert Terrell, one can almost squint at the bodies and think they are from the same time. Similarly, the 2007 lithograph by exhibit curator Art Hazelwood, "Beast of Hatred," depicts the timeless themes of vigilantism, welfare cuts, and distorted imagery as seen through the media.

"This is about human beings. This is about our country. This problem has been here before," said Paul Boden, who as head of the Western Regional Advocacy Project was an adviser to the exhibit.

Throughout the nation's history, the ascendancy of American industrial might has done much to swell the middle class and beat back unemployment, but it hasn't always been enough, historians say. In the 1930s, and again in the 1950s and '60s, a main tactic used against poverty was the government-heavy New Deal and its descendants - Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and the like.

Whether these programs spurred financial success, or vice versa, is an arguing point for economists through the ages. But a return to the government-heavy tactic, being advocated carefully now by President Obama, makes the "Hobos to Homelessness" exhibit very timely.

Boden and several of the artists made no bones about what they advocate. Social programs have been rolled back continuously since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 and began his assault on "big government," they said, and the current economic crisis demands a new direction.

Art exhibit

"Hobos to Homelessness" will be at the California Historical Society gallery, 678 Mission St., San Francisco through Aug. 16. It is open from noon to 4:30 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday. Admission is free.